The theatrical apprehension of fallen Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from his pathetic hole in the dirt is a prima facie example of how the American vision of life and the world has become totally twisted. It was the culmination of an unjust war against a defenseless people, this ritual roughing up of a tired old man who was never more than a puppet following the orders of the master manipulators who always planned to do him in when it became convenient.

Saddam was never a danger to America, despite all the pre-war rhetoric that has all been proven false.

George W. Bush — and Bill Clinton and the elder Bush before him — killed many times more Iraqis than Saddam ever did. The 20,000 or so Iraqi innocents who perished in the recent bombing of the Cradle of Civilization were at least ten times more than the number of political malcontents who ran afoul of the murderous machismo of Saddam's inflexible rule, and the utter destruction of this functioning nation-state was certainly something Hussein never contemplated.

What the United States has done to Iraq is something far worse than Saddam Hussein ever would or could have done. Saddam was never a danger to his neighbors; that was all Zionist media spin. The only country in that region that was worried about him was Israel, because he represented an inflexible stumbling block to the expansionist aims of the demonic Jewish state.

Americans refuse to confront the ugly facts about this. They refuse to acknowledge that America has become the real evil empire.

The reasons for invading Iraq have been proved beyond any doubt to have been lies. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, nor did it have any connection to 9/11, the two reasons America used to unleash its murderous military might. These have been debunked beyond all question, and still Americans send their sons and daughters to slaughter and be sacrificed for the ugly perpetuation of these lies.

How Americans could continue to support these satanic fictions is something for the historians to contemplate. When you use obvious lies to go to war, then you are the criminals, you are the evil ones. But Americans simply will not or cannot admit this.

Bush's decision to go to war based on lies have already cost some 700 American lives, with more than 5,000 other casualties, and thousands more stricken with a variety of diseases related to vaccines, radioactive weaponry, and other unspecified hazards. Plus there's the nearly $200 billion expended from the Treasury that has not gone to either pay our military for such arduous duty or rebuild the country we have just destroyed.

This money is literally a highway robbery of the American people directed by favored American corporations who have reaped billions virtually without lifting a finger. American corporations who have contributed mightily to George Bush and his fascist associates are overseeing the greatest robbery in history (eclipsing the previous record set by Bush the Elder in his plundering of American banks in the late 1980s).

But the American criminal behavior, you must remember, goes much deeper. For 12 years, America and Britain have bombed Iraq constantly, destroyed its civilian infrastructure, and caused the deaths of a half million children who were deprived adequate medical care and nutrition, all this after more than 100,000 were killed in the first Gulf War, all this after a century of exploitation and mass murder by — who else? — America and Britain.

Americans refuse to see that the war against the Muslim world has been going on for more than a thousand years, and nothing has basically changed. We install leaders who do our bidding, and then when we find a more lucrative way to fleecing that part of the world., we do away with them, just like the Shah of Iran.

Either Americans remain oblivious to the pain we inflict on this part of the world, or worse, we know what we are doing, which makes us sadistic killers in order to maintain our posh (though rapidly deteriorating) lifestyles. This is the real American way — mass murder for money.

War is peace. America is creating a hell on earth. This mission has been accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other places. And now the criminals who engineer these inhuman scams seem to want to make America itself into the same kind of place, what with arrest without trial, poisoned medicines and medical care you can't trust, the imprisonment of citizens who challenge the banks' warped fictions, and even the end of an authentic voting system.

Even in the obvious onslaught of all these atrocities, most Americans — perhaps brain-damaged by long-term exposure to flouride, radioactivity, food additives and other debilitators — prefer to believe the obvious lies spewed out by TV PR types (there are no legitimate journalists remaining in mainstream media, only paid shills) that America is still the world's last bastion of freedom.

Well, that's a lie, just like war is peace. In reality, America is the new Nazi state, goose-stepping around the world.

Americans are now like what they call "trusties" in the prison of the world. They are like favored lackeys on the plantation of the planet. But soon, as capitalism continues to self-destruct around the world, they too will be tossed into the slave quarters, treated like Iraqis, and consigned to caves like Saddam found, hiding from the mindless might that has been unleased in order to further the fortunes of the elite, and pound and poison cannon fodder like us into nonexistence.

Saddam is not the real criminal here. He didn't destroy his own country. He only offed some political opponents, something that happens very often right here in America.

The real mass murderer is Bush. The corporate TV stations continue to treat Bush as, if not a hero, at least someone who is operating the righteous machinery of democracy.

Democracy is as much of a lie as war is peace. Democracy is the new buzzword for tyranny. There is a robbery going on here which may be too late to stop. The siphoning of money, resources and even water from the people who rightfully own them to the military-backed corporations who wrongfully control them signals a new dark era in human history, a new totalitarianism frequently predicted in the literature of visionaries like Orwell and Huxley, but never actually witnessed, at least on American soil.

Now with all these free-speaking people put in prison for merely trying to accurately describe what is happening — Leonard Peltier, Ernst Zundel, Charles Sell, Rick Stanley, the list has always been endless — we are witnessing the dawn of a new Dark Ages in which you must believe what you hear on television of you will ultimately lose everything you have.

Stay tuned for "red alert," during which you won't be able to leave your houses so they can come around and take you away one by one.